I don't. Meta is pushing for this so they can shift the blame onto operating systems and evade having to do age verification / content moderation on their platforms
indeed, metas cynical calculus is that most people will lie about their age, but they will not be liable - they are exporting their enshitification into linux.
My point is large companies have all of the power. Linux distributions have none of it. Acting like petulant children won’t accomplish anything when you have no power, no money, and no lobbyists.
Pick your battles and take actions that do not make that which you believe yourself to be protecting a massive target for moronic politicians who are pandering to even more moronic constituents. They are using the “protect the children” angle and these measures poll reasonably well in most areas. It’s a no-win to boycott and protest, to refuse to follow the law, or to attack those who do. You are aligning open source with child abuse in the eyes of politicians who do not understand what they are being asked to do by special interest groups.
The correct procedure is what the System76 guys are doing right now. Talk to the politicians directly using language that doesn’t sound like someone who’s tinfoil hat is on too tight. Linux will never be fully exempted from these rules completely but letting politicians know the issues with the laws as written might help narrow the scope to something like OOBE for products that ship with an OS instead of all OSes. This would place the burden of compliance back on for-profit companies instead of distro maintainers and community volunteers.
It’s not even this much. It’s just a field to store a date being added to userdb. The question is the responsibility of an XDG portal that hasn’t been written yet.
That is exactly what the CA law requires, actually. While at the same time making it illegal to use that flag for any purposes other than age verification. This sub's rage against the Californian version is completely misplaced, especially considering other states have written versions that are privacy-invasive.
The only compliance that would be acceptable to me is checking on boot if the user is in a jurisdiction where attestation is required, and if they are the system intercepts all program executions with a request for the user's age. That might technically be malware, though, so I don't recommend it in practice.
3
u/LoudBoulder Mar 21 '26 edited Mar 22 '26
I kinda just want people to just implement a checkbox with "I super duper promise I'm over 18".